A wide variety of devices including office equipment, home-based equipment, and lab equipment, as well as a variety of other types of devices commonly encounter errors. Office equipment includes but is not limited to printers, scanners, facsimile machines, copiers, and various types of communication and telephony devices. Home-based devices include, for example, home entertainment equipment such as televisions, video, and audio players and recorders, receivers, as well as security systems, automobiles, appliances, thermostats, exercise equipment, medical equipment, saunas, pools, and hot tubs. Lab equipment includes, for example, measurement devices such as oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, testing equipment, and network devices. Within the work environment often multiple devices of the same type are employed. The users of the multiple devices often desire management of these multiple devices.
With the introduction of digital circuitry, often a LED or LCD associated with a device displays an error message when an error is detected. Currently error messages contain minimal information such as “error” and in some instances a number or code associated with the error is provided. The events leading up to and the reason for the error are frequently unknown. Often, when a service technician is contacted, the only information available to the technician is that an error occurred, possibly an error number, and a description of what led up to the error by the user or in some cases another person who is asked to relay what occurred. Without additional information, the service technician is not able to diagnose the reason for the error. In many instances, without additional information the device is simply shut down or reinitiated without solving the error causing or leading to the error(s). Significant time and money can be spent on unknown service errors for example, through the loss of information, in some instances the retransmission of information, the loss of product, personnel time spent correcting the error, resetting the device, and determining what the effect of the error was. This is particularly true in workplaces employing multiple devices.
For a system administrator the management of error detection, error correction, and error diagnosis in a multiple device environment is difficult. In particular, determining what devices are having errors, how to correct those errors short term and long term, what led up to the errors, the identification of class errors, how to prevent the repetition of errors across the multiple devices, and the like. One environment that is particularly difficult to manage is a system of multiple imaging devices such as printers, copiers, facsimile machines, scanners, plotters, digital projectors, terminals and the like. With such little information about the errors, system administrators are not able to solve these shortcomings. Currently class errors in a system of multiple devices are virtually undetected.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for improvements in the collection and management of error information for multiple devices in a system.